Migrantes
MIGRANTS/CLANDESTINES: The Sea of Herod
curated by Marcella Guerrieri
Sunday, 18 October – h 4.30 pm / 5.00 pm
Fortezza da Basso, Spadolini Pavilion, Theatre Area
Images, numbers, stories.
Images of daily chronicles, of flees towards paths of hope along harsh and dangerous routes.Destinations that are unknown as are the days of travel on unsuitable and unsafe vehicles, used to reach hostile landing places with wagons, cages, walls, barbed wire, and boundaries, which treatises and conventions were supposed to eliminate and forever ban.
Images of ill-fated human beings who are trying to escape from impossible lives with no certainty for the present and no chance of survival for the future.
Their number continues to increase, day after day, hour after hour, thus feeding the endless progression of a counter of sorrow. One million refugees in Jordan, one million in Lebanon, two millions in Turkey. Turkey, a stage between the East an Europe, a continent whose cultural areas have shared roots yet different asylum policies. Openings and closures. Open and closed boundaries. Travel stories. A beginning and an end: the start of a journey, and the end of hope. There is no more hope for Aylan, his mother, his father, his “brothers and sisters”, and all the mothers and fathers of “little Aylans”, forever children lost in the Mediterranean, the Sea of Herod.
Ideally composed of five sections, this collective work gives shape to a visual dialogue in which the bare narration of the present virtually becomes poetry recited by the artists, whose “modulated voices” have unique “timbres”. As in Bertolt Brecht’s Refugee Dialogues the artists’ “speeches” bear witness to a
present that is becoming history. Indeed, they ignite a discussion about social issues and the destiny of the Western world, who is silent, inactive, confused, and lost between banality and dominant thought.
The result is an open, inclusive dialogue aimed at redesigning possible models for coexistence and asylum as well as giving ground to culturally plural societies with a future to share.
This event has been organised in memory of Anna Masala, foremost Italian Turcologyst and Professor of Turkish Language and Literature at the Università La Sapienza in Rome, to whom many other scholars owe their passion for the Orient and Turkey.
(photo Nilüfer Ergin “Rari Nantes – Le voci mute”)
